Ok if you’ve never heard of the website it was mainly known for featuring recipes between 1930 and 1980 But the major draw was the “recipe testS” in which she made some of the well more interesting recipes and she and her husband (and later kids) tried them in often photographed and hilarious fashion
But it ended pretty much due to harassment from people on social media that started about a year ago …sometime last year some people started harassing her and he family to the point she pulled the recipe tests off the website because of threats e and put them behind a Patreon page and pretty much quit updating the website with anything but scanned recipes … and it seems she went ahead and decided to end the whole shabang minus a few discord only events …
I guess it was fun while it lasted …Just goes to show how the meme "this is why we can’t have nice things " gets more true every day…
apparently, since she uses cookbooks from less sensitive times some people violently objected to some of the phrasing and artwork in some of them since she just scanned the cookbook page and it escalated to threats and such
from the no longer there page … that’s pretty much what she did
she took down the full explanation but here’s the e-mail version when it was first mentioned and things went downhill after that :
Let’s just get the bad news out of the way first before I get too nervous and throw up. The short version is that threats were made, so posts containing pictures of Tom and the kids are moving to Patreon until further notice. You can come over there and join us, I will be posting recipe test posts and my social media posts over on Patreon for the foreseeable future. I will still be posting news and things in the monthly emails, but I don’t know about a return to social media. I thought about logging into my accounts the other day and I still didn’t feel ready, so I’m not sure about the timeline on that. Possibly never. I apologize, and if you’ve stuck through to the end of this awkward, rambling explanation, thank you for your support. There is more explaining in the blog post, but I’m sick of this hanging over me, so I won’t be mentioning it in the future.
The site still looks like it’s up, do you know which recipes offended people? Trying to judge whether it’s recipes for “Coon Chicken and Watermelon Juice”, or whether it’s just people objecting to, say, 50s gender stereotypes.
Not sure what “that” is a reference to in this sentence.
Are you using “curated” as a synonym for “censored”? Because that’s not what the word means.
Not a valid comparison. Lileks posts historical material with humourous sarcastic commentary often for the specific purpose of highlighting its idiosyncrasies or making social commentary. This sounds more like an innocent site dedicated simply to recipes that was beset by the usual internet mobs.
No, I’m using it to mean curated: “carefully chosen and thoughtfully organized or presented”.
If the “internet mob” is as hell-bound to “beset” wholly innocent sites as you suggest, Lilek’s use of sarcastic commentary would be no protection.
Jury is out as to the innocence of said site, absent the receipts, but certainly possible.
From what I’ve seen of her site, she seemed perfectly technically capable of just posting the recipe parts and cropping offensive parts out, should she choose to.
I was more looking for examples of pages that had the offensive parts that people were commenting about. Nothing I see there so far is offensive even in a dated stereotype way, I only see recipe extracts like in the one I linked to.
If the March 2016 tweet is referencing what I think it is, I’d wager it’s the old-style Aunt Jemima box people are objecting to. Which, yeah, absent any sarcastic commentary a-la Lileks is going to get a big from me in this day and age.
What a bizarre comment! Of course it would, and is. The whole point of many of his posts, like the series of cultural snapshots from each decade of the 20th century, is to revel in – and ridicule – their archaic nature by modern standards, including what we now see as racism and sexism.
I’ve long been a fan of Lileks and I can recall specific examples of these things. For instance, ads that have caricatures of black servants, to which Lileks will add a comment like “ah, they just couldn’t resist the obligatory racial stereotype”. Or the amazingly misogynistic ad that anyone who thought it would be a good idea today would be fired on the spot: a guy on the beach grabbing a young woman and exclaiming “just try to get away!”. No kidding, this was a real ad. From the 50s, I think.
No, you’re using it to mean “censored”. You make that clear right in that same post (bolding mine):
she seemed perfectly technically capable of just posting the recipe parts and cropping offensive parts out
The reason I’m weighing in on this is that I find it counterproductive and downright ridiculous to be so hypersensitive to the slightest hint of racism that one objects to historical material that is presented in context with absolutely no intent to offend. But the internet mob delights in this kind of virtue signalling.
I think the worst posts have been deleted from the site.
There’s a twitter message above from Nov 10, 2018, “Did not realize how racist breakfast could be”. (Although MidCenturyMenu’s twitter account has been deleted).
However, there are no posts at all on the website from July 1 to Nov 11, 2018 (in a google search), so it looks like whatever that twitter message was referring to has been deleted.
Firstly - I know what I damn well meant. What you’re inferring from it is your own look-out.
Secondly, No. In that post, I did mean “curating”, as in - not just scanning and posting without even picking what goes in or what doesn’t. Picking what you, personally, want to show is not censorship (other than wishy-washy “self-censorship”). If she’d somehow magically edited the original book, that would be censorship.
No mitigating “context” is given for e.g. the Aunt Jemima box. No commentary about the inappropriateness, or anything. In that case, the context becomes “Racial caricatures are just fine. Completely unremarkable.”.
Intent has never been what matters with racism. The kid who says the n-word because they don’t know it’s racist doesn’t get told it’s okay. At most, good intent means people are more patient with you. It gives you time to remedy your mistake.
And not only is “virtue signalling” a term coined by a conservative to attack anyone further left of them as disingenuous, but it doesn’t even make any sense here. There is no social cred in harassing someone. And people aren’t going to get this angry over something they don’t actually believe. Heck, it contradicts your claim that these people are “hypersensitive,” since that means they actually are upset.
Now for the actual situation at hand? I don’t know enough details. I’m sympathetic to the idea that people overreacted and forgot the human. I will continue to say that harassment and threats of violence or similar are wrong. It’s very possible I’d agree that this reaction didn’t make senser.
But I don’t see how pulling out a tired argument and a conservative buzzword really helps anything.
I think it’s a valid enough comparison. Both Lileks and the Midcentury Menu person are scanning the recipes verbatim, which seems to be the issue that’s causing the trolls to come out. It’s possible that Lileks, in pointing out the old-timey insensitivities in his sarcastic commentary, defuses the trolling to some degree. I don’t know, it’s been awhile since I visited The Gallery of Regrettable Food.
But more likely, I’m guessing Lileks gets his share of trolling too, and just shrugs it off. He’s an old newsman, I’m sure his skin is as thick as bulletproof plexiglass.
from me in this day and age.